Design of steering mechanism and control of nonholonomic trailer systems

A wheeled mobile robot with trailers has been studied as a class of nonholo nomic systems. It is proved that a system of a tractor and trailers with an appropriate connecting mechanism can be stabilized to desired positions vi a nonholonomic motion control. Trailers, on the other hand, have been devel oped and widely used in the industry. The main focus of industrial design i s set on reducing tracking error from a reference trajectory. This paper at tempts to bridge over the gap between these two approaches. We develop a de sign theory of trailer systems with passive steering. The designed systems show a good performance in practical path following, and accept the chained form transformation and nonlinear control strategies for nonholonomic syst ems.